


Putting the Pieces Together

by Anonymous



Category: Iron Fist (TV), Luke Cage (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Superpowers, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-26
Updated: 2021-03-26
Packaged: 2021-03-28 02:20:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30132495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Misty had always been good at puzzles.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1
Collections: Worldbuilding Exchange 2021





	Putting the Pieces Together

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dirty_diana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirty_diana/gifts).



Misty had always been good at puzzles.

Even when she was a little kid, someone would give her a jigsaw puzzle and she would have it done before anyone had even noticed she’d been working on it. The pieces just _fit together_ for her. But it was more than that. They didn’t just fit together; they told a story. There was a narrative to every puzzle, even one made of numbers or colors or shapes. They had a trajectory, a beginning and end. It was like she knew proper place of each piece just by looking at the whole situation, by fitting them into their story.

There were many things she could have done with her life with this kind of skill, but it had never surprised her that she’d applied it to crime scenes. It just meant a different kind of puzzle piece she used to tell the story and far greater stakes for getting it right.

She wasn’t the only one in her family with this ability. Her grandmother, on her father’s side, had told Misty that it ran through their blood, generation to generation. Some, like her father, ignored it or only used the ability subconsciously.

“He’s got it, your daddy, but he don’t choose to do his most with it,” Gramma Knight had explained to her.

Misty hadn’t understood then what her grandmother meant, what it would mean to use this ability to its full potential. Her daddy was a bookkeeper for a grocery store and seemed to be pretty good at his job, as far as his little girl could tell. He did his work and then came home, and their house was quiet and safe. It was enough.

“Did your daddy have it, too, Gramma?” Misty had been only seven at the time, when Gramma Knight sat her down and told her the truth about the gift that ran through her blood. Gramma said it was special, something they could do better than other people, but it wasn’t magic. Not like that. They could see the order of things, is how she said it: the way things were meant to go, when all was proper and in its place. As well as what was out of place and didn’t fit right.

Gramma Knight was something of a fixer, in her neighborhood, as Misty would understand it years later. Folks went to her with problems, and she found them a way forward. She put things and people in their rightful place.

“My daddy? Yes, he did, child, same as you and I. I wish you could’ve known him, he was a _good_ man.” Gramma Knight had smiled at Misty, a smile that spanned generations of their family tree. “And that was during hard times, mind you, when folks like us didn’t have much. It was tough enough just looking out for you and yours. But that’s why doing good especially mattered, and my daddy knew what it meant to do real good for folks. He taught me how. He said you’ve got to find those in need, those who don’t have no one else, and you do what you can for them. You bring them justice, if you can.”

Misty hadn’t understood what that meant, either.

“’Justice’ is a word for when you’re a bit older, my girl. You’ll get it then. But think of it like making sure things are fair for folks, when they wouldn’t be otherwise. And that’s something you worth fighting for.”

Misty began to understand, only a few years later, when her cousin, Cassandra, was raped and murdered. The cops did nothing. There was no justice. Misty remembered her grandmother’s words then. She just wasn’t sure what to do about them. She could see the pieces but didn’t have the power to make them go together. So she decided she’d find a way to have that power, so that she could use her abilities to help people.

First, she’d have to learn. Misty excelled in school. Especially classes like Math or Chemistry, where things had a proper order, and she just had to look at the parts to see where they were supposed to go. She learned to be careful though, to downplay what she could do, because others didn’t understand it. The first time she was accused of cheating, she had been so angry. She hadn’t done anything wrong, but she was accused of it just the same. The teacher didn’t get how Misty could have solved the algebra problem without showing her work, and Misty couldn’t explain to him that she’d just looked at the variables and known what they had to stand for. For the story to make sense. She’d managed to talk her way out of trouble that time but realized she had to be more careful. After that, she learned to hide and follow the boring, slow steps that everyone else followed; learn the formulas and apply them; show your work. It was tedious.

But her grandmother’s words never left her mind.

She’d once asked her grandmother where their ability came from if it wasn’t magic. Gramma Knight had shaken her head, with no curiosity in her face. “I don’t ask questions like that, child. Some folks are good are building things; others at healing the sick. We’re the same. We just see where bits belong and how they fit together.”

Joining the police made sense to Misty. She could have done anything she’d put her mind to; she knew that about herself. But she remembered Cassandra and how obvious it was who was guilty and the way nothing had happened. She thought she could have done better than those police who’d taken her statement, as though it were nothing more than routine paperwork. She figured the words she’d given that day were still in a file somewhere, unread by anyone else, with no justice for her cousin. She could do better.

And she did. Because it turned out that while you did have to show your work when solving crimes, it took a different form, not involving formulas and diagrams. Police intuition was a thing, and it even garnered some respect. Although her fellow officers figured out pretty quick that Misty was following more than just her gut, and it clearly spooked them. Her clearance rate and ability to look at a crime scene and glean clues no one else saw made her, not unpopular exactly, but not fully welcomed either. Even the good cops gave her the occasional side-eye at a crime scene, when she just came out and told them exactly what had taken place (even Scarfe gave her shit for it, and she otherwise got along with him just fine). She’d always turn out right. Pieces were missing—that was the way it worked—but she learned to see the picture around them and then fill in the blanks later. There was always a story to be told; it was just that with crime scenes the story tended to be a bit thin until all the pieces were accounted for. The other police learned to trust what she said, even if they didn’t get it.

What it came down to, however, was that she’d never really be one of the boys. That was all right. Misty figured she wouldn’t be even if she didn’t have some strange family ability to put puzzles together. Because she also didn’t put up with their bullshit or their entitlement or their bigotry. So she mostly did her thing, often all on her own, especially after Scarfe, and that was okay. She was fighting for justice, after all.

It helped that she was also a hell of a shot. Even those who mocked her “woman’s intuition,” with fear and self-doubt in their eyes, could only nod approvingly when she took to the shooting range and kicked everyone’s ass.

When superheroes, with real superpowers, came to New York, Misty did wonder. If she was one of them, even if just a little bit. If she counted among them. When she lost her arm and replaced it with possibly the most high-tech prosthesis in the world, she wondered even more. But by then she was part of something of a group in New York, some with powers some without: a network of people willing to stand for what was right. Misty knew that was where she belonged. Others could go out there and save the world from whatever cosmic forces were trying to destroy it, but people like Cassandra still needed someone to fight for them too.

The first time Misty blocked a crowbar aimed at Colleen’s head, watched it slam into her metal arm instead and just stop there, harmless, she realized that the powers didn’t matter; it was the standing up that mattered. Her family ability and bionic arm just let her stand a bit longer, in the face of even greater threats, than she’d be able to do without them.

Some of her grandmother’s other words started making more sense too.

“I loved your Grandpops name, my Jimmy. Knight, ha! It was like something out of a fairy story.” Gramma Knight laughed then. “It wasn’t the only thing I loved about him, mind you. But when it came time to marry, I took his name gladly.”

A family of Knights; Misty loved that idea as a little girl. But it had taken her a long time to figure out exactly what it meant. Now, she thought she understood.

Because now, she was watching a different kind of crime scene play out before her, and this one was live, not a set of clues laying in wait for her to put them together. This story was taking place before her eyes, and if she couldn’t see the entire picture real quick then Ward was going to die.

These were the pieces of the puzzle: to her left, an open window; Ward dangling outside of it and clinging to the windowsill; one hand looked mangled, making him unable to pull himself up; Thug #1 at the window with his boot raised to strike; Thug #2 in front of her, in the process of raising his gun; assorted furniture surrounding them in this dingy apartment that Ward had no business even being.

Misty could see how all the pieces would come together and the story run its course. It would end with Ward’s crumpled body on the sidewalk below and herself forced to kill at least one of the men in front of her.

Unless, she could find a way to change things: insert herself into the puzzle deliberately, alter the picture, change the story. She’d never intentionally used her ability this way, to edit a puzzle before it played out. An idle part of her mind wondered if she had done so at Midland Circle, seen all the pieces and how they connected before events had taken place, maybe she would have kept her arm.

Except, right now, a bionic arm was just the puzzle piece she needed.

The physics of the situation that hadn’t yet occurred played out in her mind as she surveyed the pieces. She would swap her gun to her left hand, while lunging to the right and grabbing an end table with her bionic, right arm, flinging it with her fully enhanced strength at Thug #2. The trajectory would end with the table smashing into his gun hand, breaking the bones of his hand and flinging the gun backwards. She would then let herself hit the wall to her right; this would keep her upright and stable enough to quickly get her gun back into her right hand and take the shot at Thug #1. The bullet would hit his raised foot, upsetting his balance and knocking him to the ground. All Misty had to do then was rush to the window and grab Ward’s uninjured hand, pulling him to safety.

She saw exactly how the pieces would work together. Then it was just a matter of following the story.

“What we’ve got, it comes with responsibilities. There’s darkness in what we do, in helping people that need it most, and it’s easy to get lost in that.” After Cassandra’s death, Gramma Knight had taken Misty aside to give her another lesson that had, like the rest, taken Misty a long time to fully comprehend. “But there’s also joy in helping folks, and you’ve got to remember that. You’ve got to love what you do, even when it’s hard.”

Misty stood on Danny and Colleen’s fire escape, sipping her beer. She heard the window open behind her and, without turning, knew it was Ward.

He leaned against the railing next to her, holding a glass of water. “Thank you. For saving my life.”

“You know you shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” She may have begun to change her mind on the necessity of vigilantes, but she still wasn’t happy with ordinary citizens poking their noses where they didn’t belong.

“I was just trying to help.” He sounded so earnest to her ears.

“I know.” Misty snorted, in what she realized was fond exasperation. “And you’re welcome.”

Ward clinked his glass of water awkwardly against her beer bottle.

Misty looked at Ward closely, trying to see all of his pieces and how they went together. There was a lot he didn’t reveal, but she thought he might be a puzzle she’d like solve. Even if she never had been able to get a completely clear picture of other people; they were the trickiest puzzle of all.

The smell of food from inside the apartment was getting stronger. Danny and Colleen must have just about finished fixing dinner. Misty nodded her head toward the kitchen and Ward shrugged in agreement. As they went back inside, Misty thought about this group of people she now seemed to be a part of. A part of her would always be police, but these people, working outside the law, let her be who she really was, with no judgment or weirded-out glances. They accepted her and had made her a part of them. And while these were the three she’d found herself spending the most time with, she knew there were other parts to their picture too: Luke, as much as he’d found himself in a dark place, Jessica, and even whatever it was with the blind lawyer guy. They were all a very complicated puzzle, but they’d let her slide her own piece in with welcoming arms. She thought back to all of her grandmother’s advice, and maybe for the first time, she really got it. This was where she belonged; this was the puzzle she fit into.


End file.
